It was still dark when we left the Peacock. For a little while, pale,
uncertain ghosts of houses and trees appeared and vanished, and then it
was hard, black, frozen day. People were lighting their fires; smoke was
mounting straight up high into the rarified air; and we were rattling for
Highgate Archway over the hardest ground I have ever heard the ring of
iron shoes on. As we got into the country, everything seemed to have
grown old and gray. The roads, the trees, thatched roofs of cottages and
homesteads, the ricks in farmers' yards. Out-door work was abandoned,
horse-troughs at roadside inns were frozen hard, no stragglers lounged
about, doors were close shut, little turnpike houses had blazing fires
inside, and children (even turnpike people have children, and seem to
like them) rubbed the frost from the little panes of glass with their
chubby arms, that their bright eyes might catch a glimpse of the solitary
coach going by. I don't know when the snow begin to set in; but I know
that we were changing horses somewhere when I heard the guard remark,
"That the old lady up in the sky was picking her geese pretty hard to-
day." Then, indeed, I found the white down falling fast and thick.

The lonely day wore on, and I dozed it out, as a lonely traveller does. I
was warm and valiant after eating and drinking,--particularly after
dinner; cold and depressed at all other times. I was always bewildered
as to time and place, and always more or less out of my senses. The
coach and horses seemed to execute in chorus Auld Lang Syne, without a
moment's intermission. They kept the time and tune with the greatest
regularity, and rose into the swell at the beginning of the Refrain, with
a precision that worried me to death. While we changed horses, the guard
and coachman went stumping up and down the road, printing off their shoes
in the snow, and poured so much liquid consolation into themselves
without being any the worse for it, that I began to confound them, as it